‘Let me start with a fundamental observation: most people don’t know what they want unless they see it in context.’*

“Come and see.”

Movement and the ability to see, but how free are we to check something out when the invitation is made?

We value freedom, but our freedoms can become our prisons.  We choose this way, but when we want to change direction and go that way, we may find we cannot.

‘A person who cannot imagine the future is person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions.**

Alan Lightman tells a story of a world without future:

‘Imagining the future is no more possible than seeing colours beyond violet: the senses cannot perceive what may lie beyond the visible end of the spectrum.’**

Judgement, cynicism, and fear inhibit our ability to move and see.  Especially judgement early on, as we make quick decisions about the new from the perspective of the old.  Now, we don’t have to move, we don’t have to look.

There’s hope, though, in the effort of openness.

Questions are a good sign of things opening.  Not closed questions which are trying to close down possibilities, proving the other wrong and ourselves correct, but opening questions: “there’s never been a better time to be a questioner”^

Failure is another sign of openness – failure reimagined, becoming something we can learn from so we gain forward momentum.

A third sign, is struggle: when we have found a struggle, we have found our story.

(*From Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational.)
(**From Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams.)
(^MIT’s Joichi Ito, quoted in Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question.)